UK Games Expo 2024 – Roleplaying at UKGE

I love board games, but I’m a bit more of a fan of roleplaying games. Whenever I’ve been at a convention like this I’ve tried to get at least one roleplaying game in, but this time I managed to get a lot under my belt.

I thought I’d talk a little about the games I played and the different ways people can encounter roleplaying games at UK Games Expo.

Booked Roleplaying Game Events

The most common way to experience RPGs at Expo is by booking a ticket for one of the many games they’re hosting. Ever since the days of UK Games Expo I’ve had problems with this as I tend to leave it too late and take what I can. I’ve had some fun experiences (Five Go Mad in Innsmouth!) and some terrible ones (D&D and Pathfinder low level caravan guard missions AGAIN). If you’re playing D&D or Pathfinder you’re generally well-served, and a lot of the time there’s a mixed selection for the rest. My friend Arthur has started running in order to see the games he wants being run, something I should probably do at some point.

My old GM, Graham, got really enthusiastic this year, which helped with keeping an eye on which games to play. Between us, we booked tickets for a few games.

Vaesen

A game of folkloric horror investigations by Free League which went a bit more Sapphire & Steel than I expected. I played Mr Rask, a butler who’d had an affair with his old master before the tragic death of the master and murder of a blackmailer at the hands of Mr Rask. Graham played Lars Andersson, a hunter who worked with Harken Hardenberger, a private detective. My new mistress was the socialite Helena Calmondsy, who hung around with an entertainer, Miss Annie King, and an occultist, Alexander Murk, who my character hated.

We had to look into a strange malady which was affecting a contact (and eventually us). Mr Rask was of course stuck examining dead bodies with the occultist, having to remind him that he was Lady Chalmondsy’s butler and would help others out, but not him. The pair bonded over a near death experience at the hands of the undead.

This was when we saw a couple of Alien RPG tables and someone dramatically having a chestburster explode out of them, which was worth the pause to watch.

Candela Obscura

The previous game was Graham’s choice, this one was a morbid curiosity from me. I’d read about how it was Darrington Press’ original game, by Spenser Stark of Alice is Missing fame. It also had a brief moment where everyone mentioned it was a bit Blades in the Dark and they updated the demo document to acknowledge that.

My only experience with the Critical Role people is watching a Monsterhearts AP which was entertainingly acted but Mercer was rubbish at using the system. I love Blades, so I figured this would be fine.

Graham was flagging as this was in the slot that would end at midnight. He played Jack Strong, a very loud explorer. I played Esme Intrepid, a boozy former girl detective who couldn’t live down that reputation. We also had Martha Strange, a crone my character envied, and Anthony Harcourt, a detective who I published the stories of occasionally.

The world of Candela Obscura is one where the supernatural exists and we are part of an organisation who looked into such matters. Characters have a class and a sub-class with abilities. The GM was a volunteer who’d made nice little cards to give us ideas for characters and the rules of our abilities. I love a prop like that and the pulp reporter I took was why I needed up as a jaded Lois Lane/Becky Burdock type.

The game itself moved at a good pace. The system involved pool-building of d6’s, but also abilities would allow ‘gilded’ dice, which would give you benefits if you took them, even if they were lower than your best dice.

We had an interloper in the form of Darcy, who I think is a Critical Role person. She was supportive, loved the cards, but it did feel a bit odd playing to a single audience member at times. The game ended with a tense moment in a pub with skanwalkers. My character’s best moment was throwing her glass of whisky in the face of a skinwalker, then setting light to it.

Numenera

Graham and I had been sheltering outside the Starbucks when we got chatting with a guy called Ed who turned out to be the GM for my next game.

Numenera’s by Monte Cook Games and I had very little experience of it. I’d played a few hours of Torment: Tides of Numenera, the Thunderstone Advance Numenera set and one session of it when a friend ran a one-shot. I was surprised that a guy who I associated with really mathsy mechanics and bringing psionics to D&D 3E made a fairly simple game. I wanted to try the game and see what it was like.

The GM was really confident with the system and the adventure, letting us wander and do weird things. I played Kayyo, a glance who had the energy of a fitness coach. We also had Ladrin, a jack with an octopus/rat friend. Tonji, a delver, another glaive who my notes are too illegible to read the name of. Then there were two youths who’d been joking about what kind of character would be disruptive in an RPG and had landed on a barista. Mituk was the barista-themed nano, with a frothing machine weapon to scald people. Solvash was his friend, a wright who was a cranky old man covered in half-working bits of technology.

We were asked to paint the scene about our journey to a weird temple and then woke up inside it. Mituk poked where he shouldn’t have, got electrocuted and a new version of him dropped from a chute. We continued wandering through the place and beginning to piece things together. My character was suspicious of the blade marks on some big catlike monsters and how they looked familiar. Unfortunately he was a bit thick and couldn’t really express the thoughts he was processing.

There was a moment where we got too fixated on the surface of a wall and only one player noticed a big eye monster. My character died quite brutally to crystal-headed monsters who were wearing old headless dead bodies of ours. He got uploaded into the temple’s computer and negotiated with some weird creatures to get their help. He also sped up his body’s regeneration so that he could fling himself into a gorilla beast who was also being created in the same room. The resulting half-gorilla, half-Kayyo entity fell through the chute and Kayyo managed to drown the gorilla head. Ever thinking of others, he did yell at them to not enter the chamber as it was going to be a really messed up sight that’d probably haunt them. Eventually we got out and Kayyo killed himself in order to get regenerated into a body which didn’t have half a dead gorilla in it.

The game was good fun and the rules were nicely expressed. The youths playing Solvash and Mituk were chaotic, but not in a way which was negative to the game. Solvash kept rolling so badly he was begging us to believe him about defusing a forcefield at one point. There was a bio break where the player of the other jack was asking about RPGs to run Dragonball Z with. I mentioned that I’d been reading all of the Dragonballs recently and we had a lovely chat. He was also the other Dynasty Warriors fan. In retrospect, I should have got the socials of him and his partner, Tracie, who’d been a player in this and the Candela game.

RPG Tournaments

Every year there’s a Call of Cthulhu tournament and I have no idea how that works. Graham wanted to try out Dragonbane and I’d heard people raving about it, so I was up for signing up for a game which we both realised would only be a two hour tournament on the Saturday.

Most RPGs take place in the Hilton rather than the main Expo halls themselves. Not this time though, as the Toute Suite was booked. Graham and I got chatting with a group of four who were going along. Unfortunately groups had to be in tables of five, so we parted ways and found another group to play with.

Dragonbane

So how does a tournament work? Handily the hosts explained the rules to everyone. This was intended to replicate old convention tournaments of old (like old old, Gygax old). Each table had two hours to explore a sinking tower filled with monsters and puzzles. There were different criteria for points, although ‘treasure’ was a good thing to focus on. Each table had sand timers with the GM and when the first hour ran out there would be a break.

Dragonbane’s a bit like Pendragon as a system, with players rolling under a stat on a d20. It’s a fantasy game and the main noteworthy difference I saw was that anthropomorphic ducks are a thing. I played Makander of Halfbay, a paladin duck. Graham was Krisanna the Bold, a thief, as there wasn’t a dwarf to play. We had a group of three who we joined: Bastionn Bloodjaw, Orla the Elf and Archmage Addhan. 

The maps were printed on massive pieces of paper and we had a lot of elements to poke and investigate. The first puzzle took a while for us to check out, made worse when one of the judges would periodically come round and quietly ask the GM questions like, “how many attempts did they take on that puzzle? Oh, oh I see.”

At the end of the first hour we’d gone up a floor, fought a ghost, fled from a giant eel-looking thing in the basement and on the giant scoreboard projected in the room, we were joint last. 

We had a break, I bought a coffee and chatted with the other three players. They were a group who’d been playing together for years and their cameraderie was nice. I love going to conventions with Graham, but it reminded me of when I used to have excursions with my whole RPG group and how I missed that.

Our final hour went vastly better and the GM explained that we broke just before scoring a ton of points. In the end, the people who were winning by a mile at the midpoint still won by a mile, but there was a lot of movement elsewhere in the leaderboard. Our team, “Wot, No Dwarf?” Not only completed the scenario but rescued a dwarf and ended up in fourth place on the leaderboard. We all walked away with a promotional duck knight miniature.

RPG Demos

I don’t often play RPG demos at stands. Slots are short, there’s often uncertainty about whether you can get a whole group. Things have changed over the years and RPG stands have got a lot better at presenting their demos. Rowan Rook & Decard had 40 minute slots to test out the combat for Hollows in the centre of their area, on a classy looking space. I was a given as someone backing Hollows, so I decided not to take them up on a demo. 

A game I was less certain of was Old Gods of Appalachia. It used the same system as Numenera and when chatting with the people at the stall, they mentioned having sign-ups for demos. I decided to go on the Sunday, so I’d have already experienced Numenera and met up with some friends beforehand.

Old Gods of Appalachia

There were two other players signed up to the demo. I played Grey, a weird druid-type who served the green. We also had Blake & McKenna with us. The GM had some nice cards with evocative art from the book on the side facing us and flavour text & adventure materials on the GM’s side. He’d hold it up and read out things to help quickly sum up the world, the system and get us primed for adventure.

Old Gods of Appalachia is based on the podcast of the same name. I remember being a bit perplexed by the choice of system. Monte Cook Games were making an undeniably gorgeous product. At the same time, the GM and one of the other people at the stall couldn’t really explain to me what changes were made to the system to help evoke the setting, the tone and the themes. I’ve been a big fan of another horror fiction podcast, The Silt Verses, which has a game made by The Gauntlet and looks amazing. The changes made to their Carved from Brindlewood system feel evocative of the horror, the use of travel and the strangeness of the gods. I was hoping for something similar here, but got exactly the same system as Numenera, just with some changes to the names of things.

This isn’t to say the game was bad, it was fine, but the enthusiasm of the GM and players definitely helped push it along. The game won an award from the Expo which the staff were justifiably eager to show off. Personally, I’m sticking with The Silt Verses to sate my horror podcast RPG needs for now. 

Indie Games on Demand

If I have a regret from the convention it’s that I didn’t go to my usual haunt, the Indie Games on the Hour group. As I mentioned earlier, I tend not to book games early enough for UK Games Expo and Dragonmeet. These folks are why I never worry about that.

Every hour on the hour, GM volunteers offer up games to a crowd who buy cheap tickets and gather by the tables. They pitch 1-2 games and people split into groups to try all manner of games. The sessions last two hours, so there’s some overlap between pitches and players can get a satisfactory amount of time in their games. 

I’ve played post-human cyberpunk games, I’ve investigated Sherlock Holmes’ death, managed my inventory in a Marie Kondo fashion and playtested games. I didn’t go along this year and reached out to the organisers to see how it went.

I reached out to Lloyd Gyan, one of the masterminds of the Games on Demand and he shared some of the information he’d gathered about this year. Apparently they were down two of their core GMs thanks to illness, but still has a good sized attendance both for GMs and players. 

Lloyd decided to stick to six tables with up to five players, with 12-30 tickets sold for each two-hour game slot. The biggest RPG run was Black Code, which I played in 2023 with the author GMing it. Following that were Decaying Orbit and Fedora Noir which are both fairly recent RPGs and 35 different RPGs in total.

My friend WH Arthur and Lloyd both mentioned that communication has been really good this year from the people running the RPG side of things, which is nice to hear.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed each of my RPG experiences. I feel that as an awkward person, I never have trouble chatting with other players. GMs are more proficient these days with things like safety tools and scheduling breaks. Years ago I had a miserable game which I would have felt comfortable bailing from if there were safety tools even mentioned in a cursory fashion. I’d emailed the GM afterwards and even he was upset by the actions of the players, but didn’t have anything in place to spare himself and get them to stop being awful. Luckily there was nothing like that this year. Talking with a friend who was running games, there’s been a lot put in place to avoid situations like the other year where they made BBC News for all the worst reasons. 

The use of bio-breaks was really nice and well-handled this year. I don’t think I’d had mid-game chats with players as much as I had this year. I know sometimes in game folks chatter about off-table things, but as a Forever GM and someone who’s run for conventions I don’t like doing that and wasting the group’s time. Playing at most of my tables with Graham who’s an extreme extrovert helped a lot, too. If you put him in front of someone for 30 seconds then he’ll have met a new friend and know their life story already.

As ever with RPGs at conventions, you can end up knowing the character name of someone you’ve met years ago and have no idea who they are. You end up with a lot of acquaintances who are admittedly very surface-level, but it really makes a convention feel like a community. For Graham and I, it’s one of the only times we end up in a roleplaying game together as we both live far from each other. 

If you’ve never played an RPG before or are curious about a new system, playing at a convention’s a really good thing to do. Hopefully this look at different ways games are run will inspire folks to try out booking sessions, tournaments or trying demos. And ideally offering to run them, as conventions always need more people running games.